Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me, Kate Lamble.

We're bringing you this episode a bit early because the inquiry only sat for one day this week

after a member of the council team suffered a bereavement.

Carl Stokes, who completed six fire risk assessments on Grenfell Tower

between 2009 and 2017, returned to finish his evidence. And we heard that he told the tenant

management organisation that the cladding installed on the building met regulations, despite

doing no investigations of his own.

We'll start, though, with Karl Stokes' examination of the ventilation system in Grenfell Tower,

which was designed to remove smoke from one floor at a time.

We know that on the night of the fire, the fire brigade was unable to operate the system as intended.

One resident even described smoke entering the lobby outside their flat through the very vents which were meant to remove it. Did you ever test or witness the testing of the system

for the purposes of preparing your FRAs of Grenfell Tower? No. Instead of testing the system,

Carl Stokes relied on records that a contractor was servicing it on a regular basis.

Writing his first independent fire risk assessment for Grenfell Tower in December 2010,

Carl Stokes said he didn't know there had been a fire in April just eight months earlier.

Counseled the inquiry, Andrew Keneer.

And were you aware that there'd been a spillage, leakage of smoke from the extraction system

on the lobbies of floor 7, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19 and 20,

which had led a number of residents to believe that the lift lobby was smoke-logged and they were trapped in their homes?

No.

Was that the type of information you would have expected Ms. Ray to have given you?

Yes. I would also expect it to be in the service reports that I was looking at.

...